'Jaw dropping': Interview goes off the rails when Trump rattles off a series of antisemitic claims

17 December 2021

Journalist warns Trump may be inspiring his followers for a repeat of Jan. 6

Former President Donald Trump has a history of making antisemitic statements, which often arise in his discussion of Israel. And this week, he is drawing criticism for a new interview in which he echoed a series of troubling antisemitic tropes.

During an interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Trump claimed, “There’s people in this country that are Jewish (and) no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress — and today, I think it’s the exact opposite. And I think Obama and Biden did that.”

Trump continued, “And yet, in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people, which tells you that the Jewish people — and I’ve said this for a long time — the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at the New York Times, the New York Times hates Israel. Hates them. And they’re Jewish people that run the New York Times. I mean, the Sulzberger family.”

CNN’s Jake Taper, in response to that interview, tweeted:

Trump has had a complex relationship with Judaism — one that is full of bizarre contradictions. On one hand, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, was raised Presbyterian and is a convert to Judaism; her husband, Jared Kushner, is Jewish. And Trump has bragged about the fact that he has a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren; it isn’t something he tries to hide or seems ashamed of in any way. But on the other hand, Trump will say anti-Semitic things — like promoting the trope that Jews control the media.

Another contradiction: the evangelical far-right Christian fundamentalists that the ex-president supports believe that his daughter condemned herself to eternal hell when she gave up Protestant Christianity and converted to Judaism. Trump himself is not an evangelical; Presbyterians, like Lutherans and Episcopalians, are considered Mainline Protestants rather than evangelicals.

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Here are some of the reactions that Twitter users have had to Trump’s interview with Ravid:

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